Not quite. Firstly, ReadyBoost is no replacement for actually adding additional physical RAM to your computer. That’s a fact. Now will it help with the performance of your machine? Yes, but it depends. Overall in my use, I’ve not seen a huge difference using ReadyBoost while working in Windows. For example, opening programs like Office, Adobe, etc. Those have pretty much remained the same with or without ReadyBoost.
It does help with boot up times for some reason. I did see a fairly marked difference in the boot up time on my Windows 7 machine. However, it was not seen using a USB stick. Instead I used an SD card that was built into my computer. Also, starting with Windows 7, ReadyBoost now supports multiple flash drives, so I really did see a good performance boost when I used multiple drives. And note that Windows 7/8/10 ReadyBoost is far more efficient than Windows Vista ReadyBoost. If you have a Windows Vista machine, it’s best to update to Windows 7/8/10 to get the full benefit of ReadyBoost. Also, with Windows 7/8/10, you can format the flash media in NTFS or the new exFAT file system. This allows ReadyBoost to create caches that are larger than 4GB. Another point to consider. I did see a improvement in opening applications in Windows once I enabled SuperFetch. This is another new feature in Windows Vista and Windows 7 that preloads applications into your memory so that they load really fast when you start them. If you have SuperFetch turned on and you also enable ReadyBoost in Windows, you can really see a big benefit. Again, I did not see such a benefit in Windows Vista though. That might be because it’s not optimized as much as it is in Windows 7/8/10. And another thing to take into consideration. If you have a lot of RAM on your computer already (4GB+), you probably won’t see any benefit whether you are running Windows 7/8/10, using multiple flash drives, etc. It simply won’t be needed with that much RAM.
I tested it out on a very old computer I had and there was a significant benefit when your computer has some crappy specs. I doubt most computers are that old nowadays, but if you have 1GB or less or RAM, you will see a benefit to using ReadyBoost. You can also go crazy on Windows 7/8/10 since it allows you to use up to 8 flash drives! The more drives you use, the faster the performance because having multiple parallel sources to read data from is faster than just having one.
If this is all getting a bit confusing, I’ll try to break it down into some simple points below:
